The Cutthroat World of Art and Murder

RHYS BOWEN:  It’s always a pleasure to host my friend, fellow Arizonan and fellow historical mystery writer, Karen Odden. And when we can’t travel, she can transport us to Park City or to Victorian England. So welcome, Karen.

KAREN ODDEN: Like my friend Rhys, my family and I try to spend some time out of the Arizona heat each summer. In Park City, Utah, the mountains are a lovely change, and over the years I’ve found that I write differently up here. I hike most days, and as best I can explain, the act of shifting my gaze constantly between the expansive mountain vistas and the tiny wildflowers opens up what feels like a play-space in my brain, with room for weird plot twists and eccentric characters.

It’s no place for my squint-eyed internal editor, however, so I set down words more rapidly on the page. Two years ago this summer, I drafted my third novel, A Trace of Deceit, which came out last December, and I still remember my artist heroine Annabel Rowe, her troubled brother Edwin, and their world in 1870s London coming alive for me on Spiro Trail.

The foundation of the novel was laid earlier, though, with my work at Christie’s auction house back in the scandal-filled 1990s. (For those who don’t recall, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were caught price-fixing, and the heads of Sotheby’s paid millions of dollars in fines and stepped down in disgrace, while Christie’s employee Christopher Davidge skated away in exchange for his testimony.) Having never taken an art history class, I didn’t know a Miro from a Modigliani when I arrived. But I knew marketing, so I’d been hired to buy ad space in publications such as the New York Times, Magazine Antiques, Art & Auction, and the Maine Antiques Digest, where we promoted our auctions for everything from Van Gogh paintings to Fabergé eggs and Paul Revere silver spoons

In order not to appear a complete idiot about art, I perused these publications and many others. (This, despite the fact that when I was a child, my father insisted I’d never find a job that paid me to sit around and read!)

Through reading, I learned to appreciate art objects, but what captivated me were the stories around them—the daring heists, the deceptive forgeries, the vicious family feuds, the anonymous sales by European nobility who sought to mend their fortunes discreetly, the desperate attempts to preserve art during WWII, the lawless pillaging of antiquities from Egypt, and so on. On my 29th birthday, in 1994, I was in “the room where it happens”—Christie’s main salon—when Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Hammer, the notebook with the famous Vitruvian man, was auctioned off in a fierce, frantic bidding war for $28 million to an anonymous phone bidder, who turned out to be Bill Gates. It was the first time I felt down to my bones, and in the adrenaline running down my arms, the suspense, allure, and history that surround pieces of art.  

​For my third novel, I wanted to explore the cutthroat 1870s London art world, with an artist heroine, but did such a woman really exist? In graduate school, at NYU, studying the Victorian era and its literature, I learned just how difficult it was for nineteenth-century middle-class women to exert agency, to authorize their lives, to carve their own paths as professionals in any fields other than the genteel ones of teaching and governessing. No amount of “feistiness” could overcome the very real economic, social, educational, and political limitations women faced, including the system of coverture, which meant that married women could not keep their wages, own or inherit property, or initiate any legal proceeding, including divorce.


The Love Potion, by Evelyn De MorganAs I began to research, however, I came upon a few encouraging stories of women artists who made their living by their craft. One was Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), for whom the annual and prestigious Greenaway Medal for British book illustration is named. Another was Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919; born Mary Evelyn Pickering), whose stunning paintings I had seen in the Met in New York. As a child, Mary was immensely talented in both writing and painting—but her upper-class mother “wanted a daughter, not a painter,” and paid Mary’s art tutor to demean her efforts and discourage her. Like the story of Charles Dickens’s older sister Fanny, a brilliant pianist who had to leave the Royal Academy of Music because she couldn’t afford tuition (which hardship fueled my second novel, A Dangerous Duet), this anecdote spoke to me of all the painful consequences of the constraints on ambitious, talented women in the 1800s.


Fortunately, in 1871, the forward-thinking philanthropist Felix Slade funded a school of art at the University College London in Gower Street (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/about). He made it a condition of his donation that men and women would enter on equal footing for serious art study, including women being permitted to take classes in anatomical drawing (with the heretofore forbidden nudes–gasp). Both Greenaway and Pickering eventually found their way to the Slade, and De Morgan won one of the prestigious scholarships, going on to paint brilliant, bold figures well into the twentieth century.

 De Morgan’s story raised all sorts of questions for me. What does it mean to be discouraged from your ambitions by your mother, by a mentor, and by society? How does it narrow your horizon, shut down your heart, fade your sense of bright possibilities? And is there a flip side of this coin, for men?

In A Trace of Deceit, Annabel is a student at the Slade in 1875. Her older brother Edwin was ostensibly the “gifted” child of the family, but pressured by his ambitious father to develop his genius, Edwin grew sulky and resentful, eventually turning to a life of opium, crime, and lies. A convicted forger, Edwin has just been released from prison as the novel begins, and as he seeks to mend his ruptured relationship with Annabel, he swears to her that he has reformed and will pursue his craft within the law. When he is murdered, and a priceless French painting by François Boucher disappears (in chapter 1), Annabel is desperate to discover the truth about Edwin’s death. Had Edwin lied to her? Or had he genuinely changed his ways? As she and Inspector Hallam of the Yard follow the clues that lead to Edwin’s past, she realizes her memories of Edwin are not like a painting, fixed in form and tone; they all bear a trace of deceit.  
This summer, I am drafting another mystery, again set in 1870s London. Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame) has just returned from his first expedition to Africa, which he would later describe  My heroine Gwendolyn Manning has a friend Lewis Ainsley, a (fictional) journalist, who returns with Stanley and plans to write a book exposing the brutality of the ivory and slave trades. But there are influential men who would squelch that story, and when Lewis is murdered, Gwendolyn must find out why—especially after Lewis’s wife points the police toward her. The words are landing on the page, messily, but they’re landing, and this afternoon I’m off to hike and find some more.

This blogpost originally appeared on the Jungle Red Writers blog, courtesy of Rhys Bowen. 
https://www.jungleredwriters.com/2020/07/karen-odden-on-cutthroat-world-of-art.html

The Christie’s Auction Event Behind A Trace of Deceit

On the morning of my 29th birthday, November 11, 1994, I was standing in the main auction room at Christie’s. The elegant space was crowded for the rare book auction scheduled to begin at 10 o’clock. There was an elevated stage at the front, and Stephen Massey, the head of the Rare Books department, had taken the podium. I was standing along one wall with some other Christie’s employees. Rows of chairs extended across the floor, filled with potential buyers and some gawkers. On the opposite wall was a bank of tables draped with black fabric, with phones for other Christie’s employees who’d be taking the bids of people calling in. The star of the auction that day was Leonardo Da Vinci’s CODEX HAMMER, one of his notebooks, 32 pages, written right to left, in his mirror handwriting, and featuring the famous image of the Vitruvian Man, among others (illustration).

People who attend Christie’s auctions are generally well behaved. They speak in soft tones, if they speak at all. No one shouts out or flaps their paddle around. But that day people could not stop talking; they couldn’t contain themselves. The auction began, the lots containing rare books and manuscripts, signed copies and first editions, and most of them sold well. But everyone was waiting for the Da Vinci notebook.

I believe the presale estimate in the catalog was somewhere in the range of 5 million. Between buyers in the room and on the phones, the bid began to climb: 6 million, 6.5, 7, 7.5 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20 …. By this time it was down to two bidders, one in the room and one on the phone, and the employee at the phone bank just kept raising her hand. Eventually the hammer came down at 28 million dollars to a phone bidder whose identity was kept confidential. Later, I heard one of the Christie’s employees say, “It went to someone named Bill Cates.” His friend replied, “Not Cates, Gates. I think he does something with computers.” It’s hard to remember but back in 1994, Windows 95 was still months away, and Bill Gates wasn’t a household name yet.

​The reason I’m telling this story is because it was the first time I felt down to my bones the way suspense and story could swirl around art.


I wasn’t at Christie’s because I knew anything about art. I was a media buyer, in charge of purchasing print ad space for the sales Christie’s held over the course of the year, for everything from paintings and photographs to silver coins and Faberge eggs, Chinese and Latin American art, Hollywood collectibles and antique furniture. I placed ads in over 50 publications including the New York Times, Architectural Digest, the Newtown Bee, and Art and Auction. Because I was buying ad space, I had to read these publications in order to know what art to advertise where, so that’s what I did. For the first few weeks, I sat in my little cubicle and read magazines and newspapers. It was fun. (My dad always said, you’re never going to find a job that pays you to read! Ha!)

So like many things in my life I came to art—or rather, to my appreciation of art—through reading stories. About the pieces of art smuggled out of Wartime Germany by an American soldier, only to be found by his grandchildren forty years later, after his death. About the art heists and dramatic thefts out of museums. About the fire at the Pantechnicon in 1874 London, which destroyed $280 million worth of art and antiques (illustration). About the Renaissance painting by Cimabue that a 90-year-old Frenchwoman had hung over her kitchen stove for years because she thought it was a knock off. About the painter who fell in love with his subject and hid the finished portrait rather than selling it to her husband. And while I like art, it’s still the stories about it that fascinate me. Writing A Trace of Deceit, about the 1870s London art and auction world and a young woman painter at the newly opened Slade School of Art, was my way of sharing some of them.